A bilateral meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on May 14, 2026, has drawn sharp criticism for the conspicuous absence of women from both delegations. The image, which shows rows of senior officials and top U.S. business executives but no women seated at the table, was described by observers as a stark display of patriarchal power.
Criticism from Academics
Gita Gopinath, an economics professor at Harvard University, tweeted: "A painting of the end of meritocracy: A meeting of the two largest economies and not one woman at the table." The tweet has garnered over 22,000 likes. Speaking to the Guardian, Gopinath elaborated: "We have somehow gravitated back to this idea that what matters is your network and not your capabilities – and that matters in terms of whether or not you get a seat at the table." She added, "It’s just inexplicable how you end up with a single-gender table, given the many talented women around the world."
Halima Kazem, associate director for Stanford University’s program in feminist, gender and sexuality studies, compared the image to Obama-era summits. "We’ve gone backward," she said. "Obama-era US-China summits included women at the table. Now neither superpower thinks women belong in the room where great power politics happens. This isn’t just American failure – it’s a bilateral signal that women’s voices don’t matter in shaping the global order."
Previous Summits Included Women
During Barack Obama's presidency, women were seated at US-China bilateral meetings, including Liu Yandong, China’s then vice-premier; Susan Rice, US national security adviser; and Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state. Kazem noted that the absence of women in the latest meeting was a deliberate choice: "This wasn’t about lack of qualified women – both countries have plenty in their diplomatic and security establishments. This was a choice about what kind of authority to project: masculine, militarized, and exclusionary." She added, "When both superpowers perform power this way, they’re jointly defining what ‘serious’ diplomacy looks like and who gets excluded from it."
Despite the all-male table at the bilateral meeting, a small number of women accompanied Trump on his two-day visit to Beijing, including his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, and Meta president Dina Powell McCormick.
